The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics acquired Jerome Bruner’s personal library after he passed away in 2016 at the age of 101. When a scholar’s personal library becomes part of a public collection, it passes from a private space in which the library is mainly a personal collection to a public space where private aspects become 'visible' to the world. Yet, the Jerome Bruner library goes far beyond the mere function of reflecting his intellectual world. It mirrors the developments of Cognitive Psychology and other Social Sciences after World War II.

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin join together for a workshop around the Bruner Library.

This four-day event consists of two parts.

In the first part (November 13th–14th) we use Bruner’s library as a prism to look at the scientific production in psychology and social science over the twentieth century, as well as analyze the role of the archive and libraries in the research practices.

In the second part (November 14th–16th), we focus more specifically on the paradigm shifts from behaviorism to cognitive science to neuroscience.